


Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

by middlemarch



Category: Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier & Related Fandoms, Rebecca 2020
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Epistolary, F/M, Isolation, Loneliness, Manderley, Maxim is a WWI veteran, Romance, after the honeymoon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:20:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27311071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: It was a moment's fancy, but once begun, she could hardly stop herself.
Relationships: Maxim de Winter/Narrator (Rebecca), Maxim de Winter/Rebecca de Winter
Comments: 5
Kudos: 8





	Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

April 16, 193-

Dear Papa,

I do hope you will forgive my silliness at writing to you who have been gone for a year and a day, as I find I must do something and at least it’s the old fairy tale measure of time, important enow for spells and spirits and phantasms as you always said. I’m sitting in the morning room at Manderley at her desk, her things crowding around me and only this one blank page my own. The pen in my hand, the ink in its well, the spotless blotter, all, all were chosen by her. The ink is an indigo black like a starless night, like a satin ribbon. It’s too cool yet to open the windows wide but I can see the white blossom starting on the branches and it’s a bright day, one I ought to be glad of. I ought to be glad of so much you see…

But you don’t or you can’t, not when I’ve not told you all my news. I’ve married and I’ve come home. I suppose I must have done, for all it seems a pretense. Maxim calls Manderley my home, just as it is his, and I haven’t wanted to ask why he doesn’t call it our home. I haven’t been married very long, but I’ve learnt to be careful of my questions. There are some Maxim doesn’t want to answer and some answers I fear I don’t want to hear—and some I long for. Maxim is my husband, of course, George Fortescue Maximillian de Winter, such a long, impressive name, as if he were one of the Lancastrian lords and Manderley was his walled fortress like Castell Carreg Cennen. It isn’t anything like Carreg Cennen though—Manderley is everything you could imagine in a grand stately home and the grounds fall away gracefully to the sea without any of the castle’s pugnacious glare over the cliffs. We saw it once, do you remember? It was on a postcard, in a little shop I went into for buns, and the shopkeeper told me it was Manderley, the finest house in England. It is very fine and now I live here, with Maxim, the dearest, most splendid man, and I haven’t the faintest idea what to do with myself.

That’s why I’m writing to you, Papa, though at best you’re a ghost. A well-mannered one or a distracted one, for you’ve never disturbed me once, even when I might have done with some disturbing. Who else have I to write to? The staff, Frith, who’s been butler here since Maxim was a little boy, and Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, and all the others, and there are so many of them, they all expect me to come to the morning room after breakfast and attend to my correspondence. To answer invitations and issue them, to write to London for this and that, new linens for the guest rooms or a proper evening gown, or anything else I might desire, though I cannot think of anything. You’d say, I have my heart’s desire already, what else could I want and it seems I’m too easily contented or too little aware of the world. I suppose I am. Mrs. Van Hopper always said that and not kindly. I’m sure I don’t miss her but I admit, I’ve thought of writing her, because there isn’t anyone else. No schoolgirl chum, for you never sent me to school, no cousin or maiden aunt, no one I ever met on holiday or even Mrs. Van Hopper’s last nurse. I’m alone and I thought I shouldn’t feel that way once I was married. I didn’t, you see, when we were in France, but here, where everyone knows Maxim, all I am is the second Mrs. de Winter and a vast disappointment at that.

He was married before, Maxim was. Her name was Rebecca. She must have had other names, ones like Eugenie or Victoria, the names of empresses, for everyone speaks of her in the same hushed tone you’d use for someone who wore rubies the size of goose eggs and never, ever did anything that was ordinary. She was the most extraordinary woman, Papa, and I know I can never be anything like her. I know it in the very marrow of my ordinary bones, the ones that don’t know how to ride or sail or play tennis or dance divinely. She was everything accomplished and estimable and now that we are here, where she lived, I cannot help wondering why Maxim married me, for all that he says he loves me. He says it like he means to add, “my pet,” though he calls me darling, and I’d despair entirely except that in the depths of the night, he reaches out for me and he doesn’t find me a child then, even if I’m not a goddess. He doesn’t seem to want a goddess. Not then. He has bad headaches, though he never speaks of them, but it’s not a nurse he wants, though he wants nursing. I wonder, how tender might a goddess be? Perhaps there is something I may do better than Rebecca, even if it’s only to wake up when he calls and help him back to sleep. I’ve learnt a number of ways to do that and if nothing works, I don’t mind sitting up with him until daybreak.

Oh dear. You cannot have liked reading this and I should not have been able to write it, if I thought you’d actually read it, Papa. If I thought your ghost was still about, reaching for your palette or your chalks and coming across this missive between-times. Perhaps this letter would have been better addressed to Mother but how could I write her when I cannot remember her face? Her voice? I trust she loved me, for you told me she did, but I never knew it. I’ve hardly known anything.

I hope I might write to you again. You are a frugal correspondent, costing me nothing in stamps. And it would give me something to do in these long mornings. You’d never know how long a morning can be, Papa, not when there is a whole room to hold it and a dead woman smiling, very beautifully so you cannot feel any condescension, only your own smallness. You’d never know how terribly long a morning can be at Manderley…

With greatest affection,  
Little Mistress Squash

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night Dream, as is the signature by the narrator


End file.
